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Privacy as a Direct QoL Improvement

I've been pretty privacy conscious for a while, although I thankfully haven't become a privacy-obsessed hermit quite yet. I've been taking incremental steps for a few years now (it's difficult to stick with drastic changes!), and only after recently ditching Spotify[1] did I realize that being able to live privately actually contributes a real, meaningful quality of life improvement.

I've often thought that being privacy conscious is really quite a nuisance - eschewing those tightly integrated technological silos is often a win for privacy, but costs quite a bit of convenience, and I can't imagine this is really a controversial take. I take steps to preserve my privacy not because it makes my life more convenient; I take those steps because I believe in privacy as a fundamental human right. This is how I've thought about privacy for quite some time - I am willing to make incremental changes that allow me to live more privately, and in exchange I sacrifice a little convenience. Eventually I end up with a computing experience that is probably vastly different from typical experience that does not centre privacy, but just like a hypothetical frog being boiled, I am accustomed to it and do not feel as though I'm missing out on anything too major. I have ended up retaining only the privacy-violating services that I really do rely on, and have managed to ditch almost everything else.

It was only recently when I ditched Spotify that I realized that living more privately, while often an inconvenience, also had a very direct QoL improvement - I was no longer conscious about what I was listening to. Before I was aware that my every listen, no matter how brief, was recorded and likely analysed[2]. The music I listen to, and when, feels supremely personal. It reveals how I feel at some point in time, not to mention broader strokes like how the music I listen to may reveal far more insight into myself than I'm comfortable sharing. And now I say it aloud, it seems so obvious - I am a lot more comfortable when I know that I am not being constantly watched. This isn't some material benefit of privacy - those exist too, especially if you're looking for privacy against the State - but it's still a real, tangible improvement with regards to how I feel when I'm interacting with my computer.

I can see it clearly now - where as before my desire for personal privacy was driven by ideology, now it is also driven by the real, tangible desire to live a life free from the discomfort of constant, unerring observation. How didn't I realize this sooner?!

[1]: Now I maintain a music collection and stream it from a private server (running Navidrome) to my computer and phone, using mopidy-subidy and Ultrasonic respectively. It works great, and I even hacked a quick "fetch a list of similar artists from last.fm" into the MPC frontend I use (Mingus) for quick music discovery.

[2]: This isn't a hypthetical, by the way. If you use Spotify, just request a copy of your data and take a look.

last updated: 2022-12-26